These arguments are so obvious, that it may seem superfluous to dwell upon them.  But those who have observed how much the events of that time are misrepresented and misunderstood will not blame us for stating the case simply.  It is a case of which the simplest statement is the strongest.

The enemies of the Parliament, indeed, rarely choose to take issue on the great points of the question.  They content themselves with exposing some of the crimes and follies to which public commotions necessarily give birth.  They bewail the unmerited fate of Strafford.  They execrate the lawless violence of the army.  They laugh at the Scriptural names of the preachers.  Major-generals fleecing their districts; soldiers revelling on the spoils of a ruined peasantry; upstarts, enriched by the public plunder, taking possession of the hospitable firesides and hereditary trees of the old gentry; boys smashing the beautiful windows of cathedrals; Quakers riding naked through the market-place; Fifth-monarchy-men shouting for King Jesus; agitators lecturing from the tops of tubs on the fate of Agag;—­ all these, they tell us, were the offspring of the Great Rebellion.

Be it so.  We are not careful to answer in this matter.  These charges, were they infinitely more important, would not alter our opinion of an event which alone has made us to differ from the slaves who crouch beneath despotic sceptres.  Many evils, no doubt, were produced by the civil war.  They were the price of our liberty.  Has the acquisition been worth the sacrifice?  It is the nature of the Devil of tyranny to tear and rend the body which he leaves.  Are the miseries of continued possession less horrible than the struggles of the tremendous exorcism?

If it were possible that a people brought up under an intolerant and arbitrary system could subvert that system without acts of cruelty and folly, half the objections to despotic power would be removed.  We should, in that case, be compelled to acknowledge that it at least produces no pernicious effects on the intellectual and moral character of a nation.  We deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions.  But the more violent the outrages, the more assured we feel that a revolution was necessary.  The violence of those outrages will always be proportioned to the ferocity and ignorance of the people; and the ferocity and ignorance of the people will be proportioned to the oppression and degradation under which they have been accustomed to live.  Thus it was in our civil war.  The heads of the church and state reaped only that which they had sown.  The Government had prohibited free discussion:  it had done its best to keep the people unacquainted with their duties and their rights.  The retribution was just and natural.  If our rulers suffered from popular ignorance, it was because they had themselves taken away the key of knowledge.  If they were assailed with blind fury, it was because they had exacted an equally blind submission.